That the current fuel crisis could have been prevented is a fact that does not have to be proven. Whether what caused the crisis was the shortage of foreign currency or some bridge in Mozambique is equally not worthy discussing if one considers the losses both financial and non financial that the country has suffered.
For a country like Malawi, everything depends on fuel in as much as it depends on agriculture-for even the very same agriculture heavily depends on fuel. If there were no fuel, those using tractors to plough their land would not be able to do their job. The shortage of fuel makes the transportation of farm inputs/implements like fertilizer, chemical, hoes, axes and seed impossible. As if that is not enough, lack of fuel means the farmer will simply have to keep his/her produce, as there will be no transport to take his produce to the market. The shortage of fuel therefore needs not to be viewed as a minor problem requiring a quick fix solution but rather as a catastrophe that needs to be prevented at all costs. While most of us would be thinking about how much money has been lost due to the fuel crisis, there is also need to focus on how many lives have been lost due to the same. Although it is not easy to tell in terms of numbers how many people we may have lost due to reasons directly related to the fuel crisis; the fact remains that lives have been lost.
It is for the very same reason that those responsible for the current crisis need to come out in the open and tell the nation what exactly is causing these fuel problems. Those responsible for ensuring that Malawi has enough fuel at all times-be it the Minister or whosoever is responsible should tell us what actions have been taken to ensure that this never happens again otherwise the cost of these crises is too much if one goes beyond the financial losses the country suffers.
Apart from the lost lives, there are a lot of people who have obviously lost their hard earned property-And sadly, lives too- because the police vehicle had no fuel to rush to a crime scene to offer them protection. Still others found themselves stuck in the middle of nowhere and very vulnerable to robbers because their vehicles had run out of fuel
Surely whoever said it would be hard to notice sanity if there weren’t fools or those insane did not lie. There are some irresponsible and very insensitive party politics zealots who would like to make people believe that the cost of this crisis is surely small compared to what the country might have lost ‘had the government not intervened quickly.’ While it might be debatable as to whether government has really intervened quickly in this crisis, what might not be debated is that a lot of children, pregnant mothers and many other productive citizens in this country have lost their lives because the ambulance at a particular district hospital had no fuel to pick that particular patient to the hospital. Indeed a lot of people have lost lives because some standby generator could not function due to the absence of diesel when the equally unreliable power had gone out when someone was being operated on.
While the politician would like to treat fuel as a political issue the above scenarios should prove that fuel is no such a small matter and needs to be treated as a matter of life and death because it is such.
While the Malawian politician might be a lucky chap considering that in most cases the Malawian public does not demand that they be accountable in cases like these, one needs to feel both guilty and ashamed for being responsible for such loses. In fact the best one can do in view of this is to apologize to the nation and step down immediately. It is unfortunate that in Malawi because politicians would like us to see them as gods, apologizing is viewed in the negative. Because we join politics to get rich and not to serve people, it is very unlikely that those behind this crisis-which has happened twice now in less than a year- would think of resigning. While it may be argued that asking those responsible to resign may be being hard on them, a mere admission of guilt and a simple apology is as unthinkable as expecting snow on a very hot day.
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